Leaving principles for later?

Submitted by Matthew on 18 May, 2016 - 10:54 Author: Martin Thomas

At the Lutte Ouvriere fete on 14-16 May, we met comrades from IZAR (Revolutionary Anti-Capitalist Left), a group expelled in 2015 from the “Mandelite” (Fourth International) organisation in Spain because they called for a stance more independent from the leadership of Podemos, the new broad leftish party.

The following critique is part of a document published by IZAR with sympathisers in France, the USA, Germany, Greece, and Italy.

“There has been no balance-sheet on the many attempts to build ‘broad parties’ over the last 25 years by the sections of the Fourth International.

“Whether in the framework of Syriza, of Podemos, or before that with Rifondazione in Italy, the PT in Brazil, the Bloco de Esquerda [Left Block] in Portugal, or even within the NPA [in France], the leadership of the Fourth International has followed a policy that has been limited to entering (or launching) broad organisations without simultaneously building demarcated revolutionary currents or organisations. This has led to the dissolution (Portugal, Denmark) or the dispersion (Italy, Brazil, France...) of whole sections.

“The support by Rifondazione for the formation of a bourgeois government (the Prodi government in 2006) and the vote for war credits [for Italian military action in Afghanistan]; the position of the comrades of the Left Bloc [in Portugal] in favour of the austerity measures in Greece in 2012; the vote of the comrades of the RGA [Red Green Alliance] in Denmark to support the left government [of the Social Democratic Party] there in 2011-2012; the participation of the old section of [the Fourth International] in Brazil in Lula’s government [i.e. they took ministerial positions]...

“Entry into these broad organisations and the abandonment of the revolutionaries’ own organisational structures has been accompanied by an political adaptation policy to the leaderships of these reformist currents. Organisational independence (whether through independent organisations or through organised currents within broader groupings) is not a minor issue. It serves to carry out a policy: what is at stake in maintaining organizational independence for the revolutionaries is the need to fight for our revolutionary ideas.

“For us, the revolutionary program is not an identity that we should leave for later, when conditions are more favourable. This program is relevant today to respond to the current crisis of the capitalist system. It is not a program that consists of once-and-for-all fixed formulas but an always-updated concrete program based on our method, which remains the same: class independence, the transitional method...”

IZAR

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Submitted by Jason Schulman on Thu, 19/05/2016 - 22:45

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